In what will be a momentous occasion for Google, Nevada has just unveiled the intent to draft legislation that will make them the first state in the United States to approve autonomous, self-driving cars. As we at SiliconANGLE noticed before, the search giant with a penchant for pushing the technological envelope had been testing self-driving cars two years ago.

A legal framework allowing Google to put these vehicles on public roads will—excuse the pun—pave the way for their future.

According to a PCMag article on the subject, the vehicles will be outfitted with different license plates so that drivers and authorities know that the car they’re following (or driving next to) is self-guided,

Autonomous test vehicles will display a red license plate, Nevada officials said. If and when the technology is approved for public use, the cars will carry a green license plate. Nevada’s standard license plates are bluish-gray, with most of the license plate representing mountains fading into a yellowish sky.

The legislative process began last June when the state passed a bill that required the Department of Motor Vehicles to draft rules concerning regulations on self-driving cars. Today, the Nevada DMV approved those regulations allowing the autonomous vehicles onto public roadways.

“Nevada is the first state to embrace what is surely the future of automobiles,” Department of Motor Vehicles director Bruce Breslow said in a statement. “These regulations establish requirements companies must meet to test their vehicles on Nevada’s public roadways as well as requirements for residents to legally operate them in the future.”

Breslow added that he’s proud to announce that Nevada will be the first US state to embrace this emerging technology. In many ways, his state is an excellent testing ground for such vehicles with a desert climate, punctuated by mountains, and long, well-developed roadways stretching the length and breadth of the region. As a result, it leaves a lot of area to traverse and in parts sparse population to potentially trip up an autonomous car as it’s doing its rounds.

Reports from August 2010 have a Google statement mentioning that they’d already travelled more than 16,000 miles with self-driving cars without accident—although not without driver intervention. It’s noted, though, that one car did get into a fender-bender, but the accident was blamed on the human driver and not the self-guided software.

This sort of technology would in the short term revolutionize the way that we deliver goods from place-to-place. Currently, human drivers make up the entirety of the delivery force who provide the logistics for keeping a city or a state running (long-haul interstate trucking doesn’t seem like it’s going to be looking at automated trucks for many years to me.) By having automated vehicles make short and well-trod supply runs between fixed points one fuel tank apart, it could take a lot of strain off drivers.

The JohnnyCab from Total Recall, self-driving cars from I, Robot, and many other science fiction movies and books bring this idea to mind. For many years, autonomous cars have been posited as a possible solution to traffic jams (or at last smart/aware cars.) These are just the formative years for the product so any way that they could change the United States, Nevada, or let alone the human-vehicle paradigm is still simply speculation.